Koji and Gustav, Lady Gaga‘s two kidnapped French bulldogs, have been returned unharmed by a mystery woman who…what, just happened to find the them on the street? Or who maybe read about the $500K that Lady Gaga had offered to anyone who returns the dogs, even if the person in question “finds them unknowingly”? **

The dogs were stolen Wednesday night in Hollywood from Lady Gaga’s dog walker, Ryan Fischer, who was shot during the altercation.

The dogs were dropped off at the LAPD’s Olympic Station (1130 Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90006 — near corner of Vermont and 11th Street). The thieves are still on the loose, according to the fuzz. What are the odds that the woman who returned the dogs knows a little something about something?

“Cancel culture is real, it’s insane, it’s growing exponentially, and it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. If you think it’s just for celebrities, no. In an era in which everyone is online, everyone is a public figure. It’s like we’re all trapped in The Hills Have Eyes…and wifi.”

Seems #AmyZiering #KirbyDick @JaneDoeFilms & @HBODocs won’t come clean about the train scam they’ve pulled in their #WoodyAllen hit-job. I'll reveal all prior to the fourth episode of this one-sided mess. But if I reach 150 RTs of this tweet, I’ll prioritize and post by Monday. https://t.co/vTH5BHPc5d

— Robert B. Weide (@BobWeide) February 26, 2021

Or should I say “here’s hoping”? God and vaccines willing, the 2021 Telluride Film Festival (Thursday, 9.2 thru Monday, 9.6) will be a humdinger, you bet. Too few days, too many films. At least 20 hotties.

Among the titles that could play over this five-day gathering: 1. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom; 2. Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth 3. Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch; 4. Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley; 5. Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde ; 6. Robert Eggers‘ The Northman; 7. Leos Carax‘s Annette; 8. Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog; 9. Terrence Malick‘s The Way Of The Wind; 10. Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter; 11. Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta; 12. Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins; 13. Celine Sciamma‘s Petite Maman; 14. Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island; 15. Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater; 16. Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis; 17. Ruben Östlund‘s Triangle of Sadness; 18. Steven Soderbergh‘s No Sudden Move; 19. Ridley Scott‘s Gucci; and 20. Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho.

What other possibilities? And what are the realistic odds that screenings will be able to happen in the old-fashioned, pre-pandemic way?

This may be the ugliest pair of upscale men’s loafers I’ve ever seen in my life. The Bruno Magli / Bloomingdale’s people are actually asking $350 for them. If I was roaming around Bloomies and a sales person came up and said “as a valued customer would you consider accepting a pair of these loafers as a special gift?”, I would say “thanks very much but no thanks…no offense but I find that white stitching appalling and that silver clasp ornament offensive…these are loafers for 95 year-old mafia guys playing shuffleboard in a retirement community.”

NYC-area friendo: “Not to encourage your obsession with cancel-culture safeties and the Khmer Rouge, but what would happen if Randy Newman‘s “Good Old Boys” was released today? A brilliant, scathing, blatantly anti-racist album, as relevant today as it was when it was released in 1974. But satire doesn’t play if you don’t have context. And I dare you to find the right context for any 20-year-old junior at Smith College. If people can be castigated for even alluding to ‘the n word’ in context as opposed to the actual word, it’s Orwell time.”

HE to friendo: Of course it’s Orwell time. And if Newman had been born in 1983 or ’93 instead of ’43 and cooked up “Good Old Boys” on his own, no record company would touch him with a 20 foot-pole. And if he self-published the Khmer Rouge would send out assassins.

I was writing up an interview I did last week with Crisis director, writer, producer and costar Nic Jarecki (Arbitrage). An hour ago I happened to click on his film’s Rotten Tomatoes page and damn near fell backward. Jesus H. Christ!

Remember Tom Hanks‘ League of Their Own moment when he exclaims “there’s no crying in baseball!”? That’s me right now except I’m saying to the critics “you guys can’t give a 26% RT rating to a film that’s ambitious and moderately gripping and narratively efficient for the most part…it deserves a pass, for God’s sake! You can say it has an issue or two but nothing fatal…c’mon, it’s more or less fine!

“Are you dumping on it because Armie ‘Cunnilingus Cannibal’ Hammer is easy pickings right now? That’s not fair at all, and besides Hammer’s performance is perfectly sturdy and approvable.”

I know when I’m seeing a film that’s so cloying and clumsy and stupid that it drives me up the wall. That’s how I felt after seeing Pete Docter‘s Soul, and it got a 95% RT rating. Because it’s the first animated Pixar feature to focus on an African-American character, and so everyone loved it despite an infuriating plotline. I certainly didn’t “enjoy” sitting through J. Bklakeson‘s I Care A Lot, a broadly performed dark comedy about a predatory, court-appointed guardian of older people (Rosamund Pike), but the RT critics gave it an 81% rating.

In a fair and just world Soul would have earned a 45% rating, I Care A Lot might have gotten a 70% score and Crisis (Quiver, 2.26) would have cruised through to, say, an 82% score. Is Crisis as good as Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic? No, but it’s smart and well assembled. This movie does not deserve to die! But it looks like it might, partly because of what the RT gang is saying right now.

It’s Armie Hammer. I know it’s Armie Hammer. The bastards are figuring “okay, the industry is giving him the temporary boot and he’s a rich white guy so I can trash this all I want and nobody will say anything.”

One of the fairest reviews I can find was penned by whattowatch.com’s Todd Gilchrist. “There’s nothing sexy about Crisis at all,” he begins. “Certainly in comparison to other drug trafficking operations and their perpetrators chronicled on television and in film, watching a kid cross the Canadian border with a backpack full of pills isn’t very exciting. But projected against the backdrop of this ‘invisible’ epidemic, writer-director Nicholas Jarecki aims to tell his very own Traffic by exploring the way that the pharmaceutical industry has become a legitimate face overshadowing what has become a cutthroat, lucrative and most of all destructive criminal enterprise.

“Earnest, predictably urgent performances by Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer and Evangeline Lilly help the audience navigate through just three arenas of this crisis — in boardrooms, the streets and suburban neighborhoods — while Jarecki creates a latticework that’s suitably complex but nevertheless doesn’t fully connect the dots between them.”

HE comment: A movie that “doesn’t fully connect the dots” doesn’t mean “eeww, it stinks!” It means “it’s not perfect but it’s not bad!”

Gilchrist: “Hammer plays Jake Kelly, an undercover federal agent trying to broker a multi-million-dollar deal for Fentanyl between his Armenian partners and a mysterious Canadian supplier named ‘Mother.’ Meanwhile, Lilly plays Claire Reimann, a recovering Oxycodone addict whose son dies under mysterious circumstances, prompting her to investigate what happened after the police label it accidental. And Oldman plays Tyrone Brower, a university professor who finds himself battling the pharmaceutical giant that provides his research funding after a test of one of their new, supposedly non-addictive pain killers produces some alarming results.”

Jordan Ruimy is finishing up his Best Films of the ’80s critics poll, which 200 critics have participated in. The #1 pick is no surprise but I’ll get into that when Jordan posts on Monday. He’s given me permission to discuss the film that occupies the #13 slot — Martin Scorsese‘s The King of Comedy (’83). Which Average Joes hated, of course. Critics are the only ones who truly love this deeply uncomfortable, hoi-polloi-loathing film. I adore three or four scenes (“His name is Pumpkin…you know a Pumpkin?” plus “you should get cancer!” are the top two) but mostly it’s a grueling sit. And yet, after a fashion, it’s a powerful look at celebrity wannabe-ism and the aggressive shallowing of American culture.

Scorsese had a tough time in the early to mid ’80s. Post-Raging Bull he thought about getting out of feature films, his health was up and down, The King of Comedy (’83) totally tanked, Paramount abandoned support of a higher-budgeted version of The Last Temptation of Christ (Aidan Quinn as Jesus, Sting as Pontius Pilate, etc.) and he was more or less forced to dive into the low-budget indie realm with the offbeat, comically perverse After Hours (’85).

But once the shooting and editing of After Hours were finished things began to look up. Scorsese took a director-for-hire gig on The Color of Money, which wasn’t all that great but has its moments. He finally assembled Last Temptation funding ($7 million) through Universal and began shooting it in Morocco in October ’87. And of course he’d begun developing and preparing Goodfellas by mid ’86 with Nic Pileggi‘s first-draft screenplay popping out sometime around November of ’86. By any measure Goodfellas was the crowning creative achievement of Scorcese’s ’80s period, even though it wasn’t released until the fall of ’90.

So basically the ’80s wasn’t a downer decade for Scorsese but his greatest if you step back and take it all in — the legendary Raging Bull, the fearlessly frank The King of Comedy and the weirdly burrowing After Hours, the occasionally interesting and commercially tolerable The Color of Money, the spiritually soaring and transcendent The Last Temptation of Christ (best Jesus movie + best death scene ever), and the mesmerizing gangster powerhouse that was Goodfellas. Three stone classics, two admirably offbeat digressions and one straight-down-the-middle star vehicle that isn’t too bad if you step back and ease up.

HE to Paul Schrader on Facebook:

Paul — I’m a contented owner of a Criterion Bluray of Lindsay Anderson‘s “If…” I recently re-watched it, and I was just swooning over the arc of it, the disciplinary culture that Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and his two irreverent roommates and spiritual brothers-in-arms are less and less tolerant of…actually five when you count the dark-haired girl and the young blonde gay kid…the way it blends myth and romantic fantasy and sexuality and then escalates into surrealism and metaphors of violent revolution and finally explodes with outright murder and gunfire and grenades without actually, literally killing anyone.

It’s really quite phenomenal how it articulated the dreams of social upheaval that were simmering and percolating in the late ‘60s without actually embracing anything that could be called literally or pragmatically “political”…it was all a delirious sort of irrational longing or play-acting…a young man’s dream movie…a dream that was part poem, part mysticism, part loathing of strict Bible-quoting authoritarians, part snifters of brandy, part pot & psychedelia, part Paul McCartney‘s moustache, part black hat and cloak, part “Roland the headless Thompson gunner” in the Belgian Congo, part SDS, part homoeroticism from a distance, part William S. Burroughs…what a dive into the pool.

And then I came upon this “If…” review you wrote in June ‘69, and I can’t help but wonder how you could have possibly back-handed this film, which may have over-played or under-played in one way or another but was clearly channeling what was happening at that strangely unsettling, occasionally magical moment in time.

During the promotion of The Nice Guys (’16) Ryan Gosling called Abbott & Costello‘s Hold That Ghost (Universal, 8.6.41) “kind of a masterpiece.” I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s an agreeably silly deal — sloppy but lively, fast-paced, everyone’s on mescaline including the tough-guy gangsters**. On top of which I’m a fool for handsomely mastered 1080p versions of silvery black-and-white films of the ’40s. Which is why I’d love to get my hands on a Hold That Ghost Bluray.

The problem is that it isn’t selling or renting as an individual unit. You have to shell out $105 for an Abbott & Costello Complete Universal Collection box set. I wish the Universal home video guys would ease up and issue a stand-alone Bluray. That’s all I have to say.

Herewith a brief encounter with the legendary David Ogilvy, the Godfather of all Mad Men and the poet laureate of ’50s and ’60s smooth-as-silk advertising.

It happened in June of ’76 at Chateau de Touffou, a medieval French mansion Ogilvy had purchased in 1966. He had once been married to Anne Cabot, the sister of the mother of my girlfriend at the time, Sophie Black (a descendant of the Cabot family, later to become a fairly renowned poet), and so during our European travels Sophie arranged a drop-by.

Ogilvy was about 65 at the time. He was a wise, learned, blue-blood type with a capacity for snooty bon mots (he described his castle as being located “in the South Dakota of France“) but was quite friendly and gentle and polite. We got along pretty well. I told him my father had been a J. Walter Thompson exec back in the ’60s, and then a Direct Marketing pioneer in the ’70s.

Ogilvy spotted right away that my French was all but non-existent (if it had existed it would have been called moronic), and considerately told his wife Herta that we should only speak English.

David and Herta were as kind and gracious as they come. A delightful interlude. Ogilvy died in July 1999.

Chateau Touffou’s garden had the most luscious, apple-sized strawberries I’ve ever seen or tasted in my life. There was also an underground jail (a leftover from the middle ages) with tiny little cells…horrid.

The strawberries grown at Chateau Touffou were huge, almost apple-sized. If I had to classify their shape, I would say they were long-wedge

Friendo #1: “Kudos to the N.Y. Times for publishing Michael Powell‘s story about the Smith College kerfuffle surrounding Oumou Kanoute (“Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College“). How this got published is a miracle. We need more journalists with brass balls to keep writing about this. PBS should do a Frontline on it, or will they be too afraid? This story reads straight out of Salem in 1692.”

HE to Friendo #1: “Smith College is, plainly and simply, nothing less than an insane asylum. Because the consciousness of the student body is clearly over the waterfall. As in stark raving mad. Oumou Kanoute is a fanatical paranoid — in a fair and just world she would face consequences.”

Friendo #2: “It’s the new cult consciousness, and it’s on college campuses everywhere. It’s about race and gender and fear and paranoia. ‘[Fill in the blank] is attacking me and/or making me feel unsafe!” It’s an absolute mental illness, and it’s spreading like wildfire.”